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Follow-up Email Questionnaire
Workshop sign up system
MeetupMeetupMeetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. workflow
MeetupsMeetupMeetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. spreadsheet project
Newsletter request for workshops that have run it
Train the trainers workshops — folks leaving early
Phases 1 and 2
A lot of little items that I want to communicate with everyone where it’s at, decisions made, etc. And if there’s time, #11 is a bigger item. I’m hoping for some discussion.
Reports
@miriamgoldman I’ve handed off some of my smaller tasks, such as the reminders and such, to others, so I can focus on the bigger items.
I’ve created a Doodle poll for Train the Trainer times I’m available to run the workshop, and will be sending that out this evening. This is for November.
I’m also going to actually RUN the workshop itself here in Ottawa sometime in the new year. Time to be determined once WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Ottawa planning resumes.
I’m also just providing minor general support when possible. 🙂
And had a great chat with @jillbinder about things on Friday. 😉
@angelasjin I did a train the trainers session last Wednesday that went well overall, and have been doing some HelpScout ticket triage. I’ll also be taking the email questionnaire and reporting back on the experience and how long it took me to take it this week.
@jillbinder
Wonderful, thanks for all your great work. You two have jumped in on things that haven’t been asked for where you’ve seen a need, and I’m grateful.
@cguntur I have been mainly doing Help Scout. I do have a question about the training sessions…. Can we create a google doc where we have all the training sessions listed?
First, Meetups who have run the workshop have been having great success overall, and I wanted to highlight one in particular who had an exceptional success.
Verona, Italy had 23 speakers at their WordCao: 21 first time WordCamp speakers, 11 women!
Woot! @WordCampVerona numbers are incredible! 23 speakers: 21 first time WordCamp speakers, 11 women 💪💪💪 #WCVRN
@carriedesign ran our workshop, who was trained by @simo70 to run it, who has been a superstar running the workshop many times in Italy.
Dormant Tags
We have a list of folks who have expressed interest in the training, but as @angelasjin pointed out during her recent triage work, we haven’t heard from some in a long time.
What we are going to do is this:
If they’ve stopped replying after two outreaches, we’ll do one more:
“if we don’t hear back from you by DATE, we’ll assume you’re no longer interested in organizing this training.”
Then give them a tag of Dormant and put their status to Closed.
I’ve asked @miriamgoldman to include this message while she is going through asking folks about the doodle poll for November.
Github Train the Trainers course
Thanks to @larryswanson, our Train the Trainers course is up on the #training team’s github!
This is our first draft. If there’s time, I’ll speak to Phase 1 vs Phase 2 of this and other items towards the end of the meeting today.
I’m internally calling it the “good enough for now” version. We’re having great success with it, and we’re also seeing many ways it can be improved. 🙂
Follow-up Email Questionnaire
We are almost ready to start sending out the email questionnaire follow-up to Meetups and organizations who have run the workshop.
It’s pretty much ready to go!
Goals:
Get info on where we can improve our offering
Get stats that we can report on how our team did at the end of the year. If we can get some good stats by WordCamp US, even better.
Next actions are:
@dianewallace does the small edits I just asked for. She will do them by end of her day tomorrow.
@angelasjin who has run the training in Seattle takes it by Sunday and reports how long it took her to take it.
Once we have those two things done, then I’ll coordinate with @dianewallace on where to get the info on whom to send the questionnaire to. Also I created a Saved Reply that you’ll be able to send them.
Workshop sign up system
Last meeting we talked about creating a system for folks to sign up for workshops. We talked about maybe using an existing event system or a survey.
@larryswanson, @angelasjin, and I chatted about this in person at WordCamp Vancouver and we decided to see what is available for us in Helpscout. @iandunn, who was also at the camp, agreed to look into this for us. @larryswanson and I are composing a message that he’ll post to Community P2P2P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. (the place where I post these recaps) and tag Ian in.
We have a list of wants, and I would say the main three big goals are:
Have people feel like they’ve signed up for something officially so they’re more likely to show up
Give the trainer an easy to refer to list of who is coming
Automated reminders that the training is coming up so we can lighten how much work the trainer needs to put into a training
Meetup workflow
It was pointed out to me that our workflow from “a Meetup expresses interest in training” through to “they’ve taken training and we follow up with them” is confusing. There are a number of moving pieces to it.
I have done up a flowchart, and @larryswanson and I are going to see if we can get help from another team to make it beautiful and clear.
However, if anyone in our team (or any lurkers not in our team) would love to do this, please let me know. ^_^
It would be really useful both for the folks who are currently in the process so that items don’t get missed as well as training future folks to jump in.
Meetups spreadsheet project
@angelasjin and @cguntur took a look through the giant Meetups titles spreadsheet to see if they could find other times that our workshop has been run that we haven’t known about. It wound up being a much bigger job than I had anticipated.
We got 7 highlighted, and now I’m looking for someone to check them against our known list.
@angelasjin: I can compare the ones we noted against our known list.
On that note, the other thing I did to try to find out if others have run the workshop is include it in the October Meetups newsletter. That went out last week and we haven’t heard from anyone yet.
Train the trainers workshops — folks leaving early
We had a case where a couple of participants of our Train the Trainers did not get what they thought they were there for and so left a training early.
And so we have come up with a guideline for what we’ll do if this happens again.
Before they leave, just say:
If you have any feedback on this train-the-trainers workshop, please let us know. If you found upon attending the workshop that it wasn’t what you expected, we’d love to know more about that, as well.
And we’ll leave it at that. Just the once during the meeting and not follow up with them after.
It would be great if you could add this to our Train The Trainers Q & A document, @webrite
On that note, I think I have forgotten to share this doc with our new trainers. I will rectify that after this meeting.
Phase 1 and Phase 2
So for our last item, I think we’ll dedicate another meeting to mostly this topic, but I’d like to just start chatting about it now so we can start thinking about it.
I will do so with full transparency, and all my “I don’t know”s!
When I started this project, I committed to leading it for 6 months. I’m a visionary and starter, not a maintainer.
However! It’s a year later and we are still creating the foundation of our project and I am still engaged in leading it.
But @andreamiddleton pointed out that it’s the kind of thing where there are always things to improve, and I might start feeling like I’ll be on it forever…
Which! Might not be bad. Here’s an I don’t know right now piece:
I might be willing to continue. Particularly if in my current career change I wind up finding funders to support my time on this. It’s a very time-consuming (though wonderful) project to lead. It has my heart. We are making a tangible, significant difference. I would rather be doing this than client work… and it has greatly eaten into my billable client work time… such that I can’t do both.
As this work has taking my heart so much, I’m currently in an alternative business school for social good entrepreneurships to figure out how to do this work in the world for money and be able to make a bigger impact.
It could be continuing the WP project, or it might be another form taking it out further.
My ideal would be funding to finish it here and then take that work further, as this community is such a wonderful creating and testing place. But we’ll see what happens as I go through my business school program!
That said, either way,
it would be really good for us to define a Phase 1 that I commit to seeing through,
and a Phase 2 that either I’m leading, co-leading, or that we find another leader to continue.
This has been really helpful in my focus. Realizing what items are likely essential pieces for now and which ones really are just improvements on what we have.
So as we’ve run out of time today and this is a larger discussion, in another meeting, I will want your input on which items are Phase 1 essential foundation and which ones are Phase 2 continuous improvement items.
I feel like Phase 1 is close and we might be able to call end of 2018 the end of Phase 1. I think that’ll be clearer when we all chat about it more.
I’m looking forward to chatting more about Phase 1 and Phase 2 in the next meeting or two.
Decisions and Actions
@cguntur created a Google doc for us to keep maintained with the scheduled training sessions and their corresponding Zoom links @miriamgoldman and @jillbinder are going to look it over today. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v0EsrRLXTXr579kDjFE2DmeEeFKpsCxMYyqkUQaC5wg/edit?usp=sharing
@jillbinder is going to follow up today with @webrite about giving help or support for the meeting reminders
@jillbinder will share her Zoom account with any trainers who don’t have a paid Zoom account, starting with @miriam
@miriamgoldman is going to include the Dormant question to those who haven’t replied in 2 or more outreaches while she is going through asking folks about the doodle poll for November. She is sending these out by end of day in her timezone tomorrow. As discussed, she confirmed instructions with me right after the meeting.
We will discuss at a future time how to proceed with monitoring and maintaining the Dormants going forward.
@dianewallace is doing the small edits to the email questionnaire follow-up by end of her day tomorrow.
@angelasjin who has run a workshop in Seattle is going to take our email questionnaire and let us know how long it took her to do, by Sunday. Would anyone else in our team who has also run the training be willing to take it by Sunday to report on the time? Please reply here or SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.@jillbinder.
Would anyone be willing to help @larryswanson and I make a more beautiful and clear flowchart or other instruction format for our Meetups workflow?
@angelasjin is comparing the Meetups titles found to our “known workshops” spreadsheet, by Sunday.
@jillbinder is sending the Trainers Q&A document to our new trainers today.
After @dianewallace has done the questionnaire edits, @jillbinder will coordinate with her on where to get the info on whom to send the questionnaire to.
@jillbinder is asking @webrite if she can add this to our Trainers Q&A document:
If participants leave a Train the Trainers early, say to them:
“If you have any feedback on this train-the-trainers workshop, please let us know. If you found upon attending the workshop that it wasn’t what you expected, we’d love to know more about that, as well.”
Thanks for all your work so far and bye for now.
End time: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1540404322000200
